Welcome to International Fake Journal Month 2013!

What is IFJM?
Please read the page "What Is IFJM" for details.
Learn the difference between Faux, Fake, and Fake Historical Journals.

2019 IFJM Celebration
IFJM has been suspended indefinitely. Please read the pinned post about this below.

Participants who Post Their Journals
A list of 2018 participants who are posting their fake journals this year will appear near the top of the right side bar of this blog around April 6. Lists of participants who posted their pages in 2010 through 2017 appear lower in the same column. Please pay them a visit and check out their fake journals.

View a Couple of Roz's Past Fake Journals
Roz's 2009 fake journal takes place in an alternate Twin Cites, where disease has killed the human and bird populations. (It ends up being an upbeat tale of friendship.) Watch a video flip through of Roz's 2009 fake journal here.

Read an explanation of Roz's insanely complex 2011 fake journal.

Tips on Keeping a Fake Journal
Click on "tips" in the category cloud.

Remember, "Life's so short, why live only one?"


Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Congratulations on Completing IFJM 2012!

It's over. You're through (unless you've decided for reasons of your own to keep going with your fake journal). You can step back, away from your character, and take a look at what you created.

I suggest that you do that in the next week or so. Give yourself some time off not looking at your fake journal. (I know it's so wonderful to have completed it it's a bit difficult to put it down, but "walk away" as they say in the cooking competition shows.)

When you do come back to your fake journal, spend a few minutes just flipping through the pages and getting an impression of the whole. Then allow yourself to think about what efforts you made to create it. How did you arrange for time in your day? How were you able to keep on track? If you went off track and had a couple days off why? And if you had a couple days off how did you get back to it? (It's perfectly fine not to journal every day of IFJM—some past participants have only journaled once a week!)

Look at your results based on your original goals. Did you make a list of those goals when you started? If so, get that list out now and compare what you accomplished with that list of goals.

Did your goals change during IFJM? Perhaps you had life coming at you from all directions and the time you set aside for IFJM evaporated down to 12 minutes or less a day??? How did you cope with that reality?

Part of IFJM is finding out your own real patterns and responses to journaling in your life. If you can keep up a healthy practice while being someone else what can you bring from that experience into your actual life to improve your daily journaling practice?

At its best IFJM gets the participant to look at part of his or her life he or she might not look at closely enough during the rest of the year. We are forced to look at time constraints we self-impose, or take for granted and let others impose on our lives. We allow ourselves to look at wishes, dreams, mindsets, attitudes, characteristics, and reality from a different perspective.

It's time to look at what you want for your creative life, all year round. This weekend or on an evening later this week, I suggest you take time with your fake journal and look into this question of what you want for your creative life.

Today, enjoy the completion of your project. You did it. Don't beat yourself up if it wasn't exactly what you had hoped. If we had unlimited time and resources of course things would be different. But accomplishing what you can in the time available is just one way to keep your creative engine running smoothly. It's a tune up.


It's also about living in the present moment—which is what journaling is about and why fake journaling is done in the present moment and not in one great gulp like a work of fiction.

I've been on a scanning delay, so over the next several days you'll continue to see the final 9 pages of my journal posted here. I'll post about the contest drawing after that.

Also, if you would like to do a write up about your experience participating in IFJM (sharing answers to some of the questions posed earlier in this post) and discuss how fake journaling might impact your future journaling, please let me know. If you write your assessment before May 12 and post it on your blog and send me a link I'll include a link to your write up in a wrap up post here. If you aren't going to post it on your blog but still want to share it you can send it to me and I'll post it here (pieces may be edited for length). If you have only one or two thoughts you'd like to share you can of course just add them in a comment to this post. Whatever works for you.


Thank you to everyone who participated in IFJM 2012.

To those who shared their entries publicly (on the participants link list in the right-hand column of this blog), thank you for taking up the challenge and pushing yourselves.

To those who have participated privately, but have written to provide me with updates and share your thoughts, thank you also for taking a step outside your comfort zone all to discover more about yourself.

Life's so short, why live only one!

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